While diarist after diarist these past few weeks wants you to take up Tad Devine’s and Jeff Weaver’s falsehood-based, self-serving and harmful war on the DNC, something’s been happening that you might want to know about. You see, it seems that Ted Cruz has very likely been Hoovering up your Facebook data:
The Cruz campaign’s top financier is Robert Mercer, a New York hedge fund manager who has given $11 million to a super PAC supporting Cruz. Mercer is also an owner of Cambridge Analytica, the United States affiliate of the London group SCL, which does “psychographic” analyses of voters in order to effectively target messages to them. Cambridge Analytica, in turn, is working closely with Cruz’s campaign, including up some staff members at Cruz campaign headquarters in Houston. This year alone, the campaign has spent at least $750,000 for their services. (Ben Carson’s campaign also uses Cambridge Analytica, spending approximately $220,000 this year, but his campaign is not as closely aligned with Mercer.)
Cambridge Analytica offers an unmatched offering of psychological data on Facebook users, due largely to research performed by Cambridge University’s Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan recruited individuals through Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk. Interested Mechanical Turkers were paid one dollar to take a personality questionnaire that gave access to their Facebook profiles. Those who took the survey unwittingly handed over not only their own Facebook data– including their names, ages, locations and likes – but their friends’ information as well. The vast majority of the Mechanical Turkers’ friends never gave Kogan permission to use their Facebook data.
While the exact number of Facebook users captured is unclear, Kogan’s business partner recently bragged on LinkedIn that they owned “a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States – for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristics and trait profiles.” If accurate, that would amount to over a quarter of all U.S. Facebook users.
What are Ted Cruz’ data wonks doing with all this data gathered without people’s explicit consent? Helping him tailor his message according to whoever he’s talking to at any given moment. Including, if this taped conversation snippet from June 2015 is genuine, people who laugh when he drops the N-bomb when referring to President Obama.
This flexibility in Cruz’ messaging has recently become an issue with the appearance of a Cruz tape that is unquestionably genuine:
In June, Ted Cruz promised on NPR that opposition to gay marriage would be “front and center” in his 2016 campaign.
In July, he said the Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage was the “very definition of tyranny” and urged states to ignore the ruling.
But in December, behind closed doors at a big-dollar Manhattan fundraiser, the quickly ascending presidential candidate assured a Republican gay-rights supporter that a Cruz administration would not make fighting same-sex marriage a top priority.
In a recording provided to POLITICO, Cruz answers a flat “No” when asked whether fighting gay marriage is a “top-three priority,” an answer that pleased his socially moderate hosts but could surprise some of his evangelical backers.
While Cruz’s private comments to a more moderate GOP audience do not contradict what the Republican Texas senator has said elsewhere, they demonstrate an adeptness at nuance in tone and emphasis that befits his Ivy League background. Indeed, the wording looks jarring when compared with the conservative, evangelical rhetoric he serves at his rallies, which have ballooned in size and excitement as he has moved to the front of the pack in Iowa.
Ben Carson’s support collapsed when his own problems with shifting messages (not to mention takes on reality) came to light, but it can be argued that the lily-white and Southern-Strategy-addled GOP base was looking for a reason not to support him, and that they might be more forgiving of the foibles of the lighter-shaded Cruz.